Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

A cop stood over the two lovers, looking down at them. Shannon noticed the cop was smirking-probably because the lovers were queers and the older one was wearing that bathrobe and the girly shower cap. But Shannon felt only pity for the screaming man. He could see how much he loved the dead guy. The robe and the cap didn't amount to much next to that. Even them being fags-what did it matter? Look at the poor bastard. His heart was broken.

Shannon started jogging again. He had completely forgotten the bald guy. His mind was playing over what he had just seen. It made him think back to the time he'd seen Teresa standing in the window, crying like that queen, so terribly, so hard. He knew now, of course, that she had been crying for her husband. He understood that she could joke around with him and be cheerful with her son and go to work and do her job and all that, but there was still that part of her screaming and crying inside, the same as the guy in the shower cap screaming on the lawn.

He stopped on the sidewalk at the corner of a broad boulevard. The traffic light was broken here, as many of the lights in the city still were. It hung from the wire above him, dead and dark. The early traffic went whisking past without ceasing. He waited for a break in it, jogging lazily in place with his feet barely leaving the ground.

Slowly, his jogging motions subsided. He came to a full stop. He stood there, going neither forward nor backward, neither left nor right. His lips were parted and he was breathing hard, staring at nothing. This was the first time it dawned on him: he was in love with Teresa. He thought he had been in love a couple of times in his life, but now that he really was, he realized those other times were phony. This was something else, something new. On the one hand, it was a kind of hilarious feeling, like he ought to be wearing a party hat and pulling on his ears and making faces because-hooray!-the whole world was a circus. On the other hand, it was agony, total agony-because he felt like he couldn't be whole-like he would never be whole-without her.

It all came together in his mind then. The queer in the shower cap screaming. Teresa crying in the window. This feeling he had, entirely new. The party hat and the agony, the loving and the tears, there was no getting around it: it was all one thing.

On Saturday, when he returned to the backyard of the Applebee house, when he took up chiseling the block of red oak again, he found that he could see plainly the shape that was hidden in the wood. The face of the angel had come clear to him. NOW HE SET TO WORK in earnest. He carved the angel's features quickly, half-afraid he would lose the image of the face in his mind, but also knowing somehow that he wouldn't lose it because the image in his mind was also, weirdly enough, the very face that was buried in the wood, imperishably there.

That face haunted him. More and more, day by day. Whose face was it? Where did it come from? How had it happened to be in this particular piece of wood? The questions hammered at him as the features became clearer and clearer in his mind and as he hewed them out of the oak with greater and greater specificity. They kept hammering at him after his work was done for the day. After he went home and got in bed at night, he lay awake with his eyes open and they hammered at him.

He recognized some of those features-or sometimes he thought he did anyway. He thought he saw some of Teresa's expressions in them, some of what her face looked like when he first saw her crying at the window and some of what it looked like now when she wrestled laughing on the ground with her son. He also saw the gentle, distracted, putty-cheeked angel from that black-and-white movie he'd watched in the white room. He also saw the old queen screaming on the lawn with his dead lover. And he saw Teresa's husband, Carter. He hadn't wanted to put Carter in the angel's face, but he sometimes recognized him there all the same. He sometimes recognized the grim heroes from the black-and-white war movies, too.

It was a beautiful face in its way, but strange. Neither man nor woman necessarily, though sometimes he saw more of one or the other in it. Neither kind and gentle as you might expect an angel would be, nor stern and pious as an angel might be on Judgment Day. The only words he could think of to describe its qualities were sorrow and joy. Which made no sense to him because how could you have both at once? But there it was. It was a face-as he saw it in his mind-as it came to reality under his hands-of simultaneous sorrow and joy, as if it were looking down from heaven and saw all the love and all the death on earth happening together at the same time.

It made no sense to him in one way, but in another way he understood. As he feverishly worked the chisel, then the gouges, then the smaller gouges into the wood, he understood that he was trying to carve out the shape of his feelings for Teresa. He was trying to expel them into an oaken semblance of themselves. He knew he loved her and he knew he couldn't have her and so he was trying to give his joy and his sorrow a face. He hoped then they would be outside him and he would be free of them.

But he wasn't-he wasn't free. The more he succeeded-the closer he came to sculpting the face he wanted-the more that face began to agitate and obsess him. It was as if it was watching him, as if his own emotions were now outside himself and looking back at him, staring at him. It was as if the wooden angel had come to feel about him what he felt about Teresa, the same agony and celebration, the same sorrowful and joyful love.

And it made him feel bad. That was strange, too, wasn't it? You would think that, since he loved Teresa-since he loved her more and more as time went on-you would think it would make him feel good to have an angel-even just a wooden angel-looking at him with all the tenderness and warmth he felt for her. But it didn't. It made him feel the way he had felt when Teresa told him how her husband died in the war. It made him feel small and rotten. More and more, day after day.

Finally, there came a night, one terrible, terrible night, when he couldn't sleep, when he kept thinking and thinking about the angel's face. He couldn't stop and, after hours of tossing and turning, he sat up naked on the edge of the bed and buried his own face in his hands hoping he could make the image of the angel's face go away. All he could think was Stop! Stop! Don't look at me! Because, really, what a piece of crap he was. What a crap life he had led. He was a crappy little thief, that's what. A crappy little tough-guy punk worth nothing to anyone anywhere because he'd never done anything for anyone ever, and if he'd never been born, the world would be the same or even better than it was.

New mang! he cried out in his mind. New mang! New life like princess in fairy tale, huh? Well, bullshit. Bull-shit. How did some plastic surgery and some phony papers make him any different than what he was before? Any thieving punk piece of garbage could get a cut job and a clean sheet. Happened all the time. What did that make him but a liar and a fraud, a fugitive and a fraud? Talking to old Applebee like his long-lost son. Playing with the kid like his father. Flirting with Teresa as if he were man enough to take her husband's place. And what about all those stories he told about himself, those stories stolen from those cornball black-and-white movies? All fake. Even his name was fake. Henry Conor. Every time Teresa called him that, it shot through his blood like grief. What a fraud.

It was an awful night. A terrible, terrible feeling. He sat there naked on the edge of the bed with his body bent over and his hands digging into his eyes and he felt he would do anything-anything-not to be the man he was.

Identity like stain. Identity like stain.